Some comments and analysis from the exciting and fast moving world of Genomics. This blog focuses on next-generation sequencing and microarray technologies, although it is likely to go off on tangents from time-to-time

I like cake and have written about it before on Core Genomics. In nearly every place I've worked cake has been brought in at times of celebration, birthdays mostly. However in a few places the bringing of cake has become a more formal part of lab-life. When I worked at the John Innes Centre we had a lab full of young people and our tea breaks were made extra special on Friday afternoons when it was time for cake club. One lucky PhD student or research assistant would bring in cake for the lab and we'd all give scores. It became quite competitive and scoring was brutal at times!

In my current Institute several groups have regular cake. My own lab has made Tuesday afternoon tea-break a time for us to give the lab a weekly tidy and then relax together. One of us will bake so we've got something to look forward to after clearing out qPCR plates, checking fridges and freezers are at temperature and making sure there are clean lab-coats and enough tips.

Holly's lemon drizzle cake

We don't get quite so tough on the scoring but some cakes are really very very good. It certainly brings everyone together. Why not get a cake-club going in your lab?

Over the last 16 years he's worked at; the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital on ErbB2, Royal London on Diabetes genetics, the Cambridge Uni Department of Pathology on Immunology group and the John Innes Centre on Wheat disease resistance gene cloning and arrays. In 2000 he set up an Affy and spotted microarray facility at JIC, he co-founded the UK Affy user group, which is still going strong. At JIC he also won a Biotech competition, and hopes one-day to start a business. Although none of his ideas have come to anything yet!

In 2006 James moved to set up the genomics facility at CRUK's new Cambridge Institute. Today the lab offers primarily NGS services on Illumina HiSeq, MiSeq & NextSeq for scientists at CRUK-CI and nine other University departments, as well as single-cell analysis on Fuildigm C1 and 10X Genomics.